


Glass Walls

by Sholio



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Friendship, Gen, Ghosts, Team Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-13 06:50:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9111295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Rip is gone, except he's not. A slightly AU take on the first half of season two.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Muccamukk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muccamukk/gifts).



> Canon-compliant up until going AU during 2x08 (and it'll be massively jossed when the show comes back, I realize). 
> 
> This is also for my h/c bingo "invisibility" square.

_"You know what they say - a captain should never abandon his ship."_  
\- Rip Hunter, 2x01

In truth, when he recorded his final message to the crew, Rip expected that he was giving his own eulogy. "I hope I'll see you all again someday" -- what else was he going to say, "all Gideon's calculations indicate that I will soon be dead, my atoms scattered across spacetime or throughout the Atlantic Ocean"? That wouldn't exactly leave them filled with the inspiring urge to go out and do good in the cosmos. Whatever else he'd been -- and Rip knew he'd been many things, most of them considerably less than what he'd hoped to be -- he had tried to be a good leader, and he wasn't going to fail them at the end.

"Gideon," he said as he stored the recording. "In the event that the failsafe is triggered, please play this for the crew if they ask about me afterwards." He very firmly refused to think about the fact that Gideon could only do this if she and the ship survived.

"Yes, Captain." After a pause, Gideon ventured, "And what are your instructions should you yourself be included in the operation of the failsafe, Captain?"

He laughed softly, and poured himself a drink. It was late, the crew sleeping, or wandering the halls ... fighting down in the cargo hold ... fucking in their quarters, who knew. Wherever they occupied themselves, he and Gideon were alone in the library. "I won't be. What are your calculations that it will be necessary to trigger the failsafe in the next month of ship-time, Gideon?"

"Approaching one hundred percent, Captain," the computer replied quietly.

"And the odds that I will need to remain on the ship to perform a mission-critical function at the end?"

"Based on our previous missions, ninety-two point five percent. However," the computer added, "with your recent training of crew members in the ship's functions, particularly Mr. Jackson and Ms. Lance, the odds that another member of the crew could perform a necessary function approach --"

"Approach _zero,_ because I'm not letting someone else run a suicide mission on this ship, Gideon. Understood?"

"I am only mentioning the odds in the event that you are incapacitated and cannot perform, in your colorful phrasing, a suicide mission," Gideon added smoothly.

"And if I were injured that badly, what are the odds that I'd survive a timescatter?"

Perhaps it was only his imagination that the slightest hesitation preceded the answer. "Less than point-seven percent."

"Well then," he said, and lifted the glass in a toast. "Gideon, please wipe your memories of the last hour, except for the existence of my final message and my instructions for displaying it."

"Yes, Captain," came the even response, and Rip felt as if he could sense the soft scatter of her memories blowing away, one by one, leaving the only full record of the evening in a fragile human brain that was, according to the most advanced predictive computer ever written, unlikely to survive the next month.

Well, he wasn't supposed to have survived this long, anyway. It was all right. If Gideon's calculations were accurate, he'd go out doing something worthwhile. He closed his eyes, told himself the survival of his ship and his crew was what mattered, and drank to that.

 

***

 

Therefore it came as a considerable shock when his first clear awareness of anything after the explosion in the waters off the coast of New York was the familiar milieu of his office and the pulsing blue-green flare of the temporal zone outside the ship's forward viewing port.

"And where are we going, anyway?" he inquired after he'd established, via judicious amounts of measured speaking followed by shouting, that no one presently on the ship could hear him, including Gideon. He couldn't interact with anything either, and was very firmly _not_ thinking about what mechanism might be keeping his feet in contact with the floor and the rest of him moving along with the ship just in case thinking about it made it stop happening. "Ah ... the Cretaceous Period, I see. And you _can_ in fact fly the ship, Mr. Rory. Nicely done. Er ... who precisely is this gentleman accompanying you, may I ask?"

By the time they'd picked up the rest of the crew, he'd figured out that the unfamiliar gentleman was Dr. Heywood, Ray Palmer had an unexpected though apparently limited ability to survive in the Cretaceous, and the rest of the team had a limited ability to survive in pretty much any historical era whatsoever, which was depressingly predictable.

But they were alive. They were alive and whole, including Mick, who was the one Rip had had the most compelling doubts about, in those last critical seconds.

(He wished he could talk to Gideon about the fact that apparently his final mission-critical action had been _saving Mick Rory,_ and whether she'd predicted _that_ ... except she couldn't see him any more than the rest of them could.)

What in spacetime had _happened_ to him, anyway?

 

***

 

On that first day, while the crew adjusted to his loss in their own various ways (mostly involving alcohol), he did some experiments.

He couldn't interact with physical matter at all: bulkheads, furniture, people, even Gideon's hologram impeded his progress not at all. The one time that he nerved himself to walk through a person (Stein), he thought that he might have sensed a very slight hint of _something_ , but it was such a deeply creepy experience that he decided not to repeat it until he ran out of other avenues to explore. Besides, Stein didn't seem to have noticed a thing.

He still wasn't sure what kept him on the ship, in an upright orientation relative to the ship, and moving along with it. Possibly it was only a sort of ingrained habit. If he worked on it, he could levitate off the floor, turn himself upside down, and so forth, but that was also very creepy, especially since he didn't feel any different when he did that; there was no sense that his inner ear, or any other part of him, responded to the ship's artificial gravity anymore. He decided to stop doing it just in case he lost equilibrium and ended up permanently upside down or three kilometers behind the ship.

He didn't seem to be strictly constrained to the ship. However, sticking his head outside the hull in the temporal zone was so thoroughly disorienting that he momentarily lost track of where he was, found himself a few feet outside the ship without being entirely aware of how he'd gotten there, and had a moment of utter panic when he realized that he didn't know how to get back in. It turned out that just walking worked, but the panic didn't subside for hours.

If it really was nothing more than habit, inertia, or just his own brain keeping him on the ship, he was terrified of doing something to screw that up. Being here, unable to interact with anyone, was bad enough, but at least he had company. If he ended up lost in the temporal zone, he'd probably either go mad or find some way to disincorporate whatever existence he still had to escape the boredom and loneliness.

He just wished he could figure out what had happened to him, and how to undo it.

Well, it wasn't like he had anything else to do except try to figure it out.

 

***

 

"I'm a ghost."

The recipients of today's musings were their new crew member, Amaya, and Jefferson Jackson, who was teaching her to play Old Maid in the cargo bay.

"Obviously not in the supernatural sense, that would be absurd. Some sort of ... time remnant, perhaps? No, that doesn't work ..."

Rip was pacing, wandering in and out of the crates lashed down in the cargo hold while his coat billowed around him. Why his coat still billowed when he was unaffected by the movement of air was one of the many mysteries regarding his current status that he had yet to unravel.

"It's plausible that my body was destroyed and my consciousness has come unmoored in time. Except it's not precisely unmoored; it appears to be connected to the _Waverider_ as a fixed point. Not that this helps _me_ much ..."

There were certain theories he'd encountered that the consciousness had a quantum existence independent of the body. Unfortunately, the math on that was beyond anything he'd learned, and he didn't currently have the ability to either look it up himself in the books and databases the crew members had access to, or ask Gideon to look it up for him.

Anyway, any theory that involved his survival as a mere fragment of consciousness, with no hope of ever reuniting with his body, was so dismally depressing that he couldn't even contemplate it, at least not without a stiff drink, and he no longer had access to that either.

"Is it possible that I've been slightly kicked out of phase with our universe? The prevailing multiple-worlds theory in my time was that they all exist in the same space but their atoms vibrate at different energy levels, so they can't interact with each other. If I'm very slightly out of phase, but not quite enough to be physically in sync with a different reality, perhaps I can still view events in this reality, but I can't interact with them, or be perceived by anyone on this dimensional plane. I imagine there's some mathematical explanation for why I appear to be attached to the _Waverider,_ since I was on the ship when I --"

"Okay, why do you keep making that face?"

Rip looked up from his musings, becoming aware that the game had halted in the middle of a hand.

"I am not making a face," Amaya said.

"Yeah you are." Jefferson's expressive face dropped suddenly into a flat, cold stare, regressing an instant later to its usual sparkle. "That face."

"I am not -- I --" Amaya stopped and took a deep breath. "Fine. It is simply that I find this game's emphasis on the stigma of the woman's unmarried status to be utterly absurd, and rather offensive."

"The ... who the what now?"

"The woman in the game. Why does it matter if she is married or not, and at what age? Do your people truly have such a stigma regarding older women who are not married? I found your people quite backwards in the 1940s, but I assumed things would have improved in seventy years."

"No, no," Jefferson began. "... well, yes, sort of -- I mean, it's a _game_ \--"

"She would be a respected elder among my people. Whether she has a husband or a wife is _entirely_ irrelevant. If you Americans are _still_ so ignorant as to assume that a woman's worth is measured by --"

"Go Fish! Do you know that one? Let's play that one."

 

***

 

The worst part wasn't the negligibly slim chance that he'd manage to find a way to change his own circumstances without the ability to do proper calculations outside his own head, do research, interact with anyone, or build anything.

No, it was the fact that all he could do was _watch,_ no matter what happened.

 

***

 

Or possibly it was the fact that their missions had not actually gotten any less ridiculous and he didn't even have anyone to complain to about it anymore.

"Confederate zombies? You have got to be bloody _joking!"_

 

***

 

"You're good at this," he told Sara, late at night in the library, as she drank her way slowly through his stock of 22nd-century brandy. She had wasted no time in finding the good stuff. 

"I know you don't believe it," he told her, sitting on the floor, or at least in the vicinity of the floor, while she sprawled on the couch where Rip himself used to spend a lot of late nights, working herself into slow inebriation. "I wasn't sure if _I_ believed you'd do well at leading us -- no, that's the worst part. I didn't. And I regret my lack of faith now, especially seeing it reflected in you. If you struggle to lead us now, it's because I succumbed to the worst failure of a leader: I never trained anyone to take my place. Never believed in anyone else to do the job I could do. And maybe it's for my sins that I'm stuck here, watching the rest of you struggle now."

He stood up, as Sara threw an arm wearily over her eyes.

"But you're doing a good job," he told her, looking down at her. "In some ways, you're a better captain than I ever was. I wish I could tell you that. Wish you'd believe it yourself. I hope someday you will."

He brushed a hand lightly across and through her forearm, and then walked soundlessly through the wall, going off to find another, less occupied part of the ship to brood in. Increasingly, being around people was even worse than being alone, and that was pretty bad.

Sara raised her head sleepily and looked around the empty library.

"Rip?" she said softly. But no one answered, of course.

 

***

 

He missed them so much he couldn't breathe sometimes, and it only made it worse that they were all right there.

No more of them had died yet.

Thank God.

He wasn't sure what he'd do if one of them did. He had a feeling the second-guessing ( _could I have helped if I'd been there?_ ) would have followed him around for the rest of his unlife. 

Maybe it still would.

 

***

 

He just wanted someone to _talk_ to.

Someone to notice him.

Someone to acknowledge that he wasn't a fragment of madness, that he was still a person, that he was _real._

 

***

 

"Anyone else think this ship is really freakin' creepy sometimes?"

The speaker was Nate Heywood, and a general murmur of "No" and "Yes" ran around the mess hall after he said it. They were hanging out after another completed mission. It had started with a shared meal, and moved on into drinking, as tended to be the case. The nondrinkers (Jefferson and Ray) were demolishing a stack of cupcakes instead.

"No," Mick repeated flatly, reaching for his beer. Rip, watching them all from his position sort-of-leaning against the wall, turned to look at him thoughtfully. Mick wasn't sleeping well; Rip wished he didn't know that much about them at this point, but he did.

"What do you mean?" Sara asked. She, too, had blue crescents under her eyes. Rip was fairly sure he knew what demons kept her up at night. He wished he didn't. At the very least, he wished he could get a drink with her, and talk to her until dawn. (Or, at least, talk to her and have her hear him.)

"Just ... creepy. I don't know." Heywood looked down into his drink, and mumbled, "I feel like I'm being watched sometimes. You know?"

"That's Gideon," Ray said, but he looked uncertain.

"No, it's not." It was Jefferson who spoke up this time. "You know it never felt like this before ... well ... c'mon, guys, don't make me say it."

Sara gave a sharp laugh and poured herself another drink. "You think Rip is haunting the ship?"

"Yes!" Rip said.

"No, of course not." Jefferson looked abashed.

"Stick to your guns, kid," Rip urged him.

"Can we stop talking about ghosts?" Ray asked. "Some of us want to sleep tonight."

The conversation wandered off to other topics, and Rip stomped through the wall. He couldn't even throw things. He couldn't _touch_ things.

Except ... maybe he could?

His prevailing theory, of the various ones he'd conceived and discarded, was the "knocked out of phase" one. And if that was the problem, then was it possible for him to somehow alter his own vibration frequency, enough to vibrate himself back _into_ phase enough to communicate?

 

***

 

At least it gave him something to do. It never seemed to result in anything except, occasionally, a sort of general "creepy vibe," as Ray Palmer described it during one night when Rip had been vibrating the absolute _bloody fuck_ out of himself to no particular result except higher levels of insomnia and nightmares on the ship.

It just figured that what it eventually took was a bad guy.

 

***

 

After what Rip felt like were absolute bloody _years_ of him screaming at them, "He's an impostor! He's vibrating ... wrong! How is it possible that you can't see this! Someone needs to go rescue the real Stein _now!"_ , his team were getting their collective asses kicked by this speedster _asshole_ and his team of wankers.

Apparently that was what finally kicked him over the edge into being able to make himself both visible and capable of interacting with matter in the normal universe, at least for short periods of time.

The looks on both Amaya's and Eobard Thawne's faces when Rip punched Thawne hard enough to send him staggering across the room were gratifying beyond measure, even though the expressions were mostly bafflement. Someone _saw_ him, and that was something he hadn't experienced in literally months.

"Wait a minute, who are _you_?" Amaya demanded.

Of course, the one person he'd finally managed to get to see him was the one person on the ship who had no clue who he was. It figured.

"Everyone told me you were dead," Thawne snarled, struggling to his feet.

"Just for the record, Thawne," Rip panted, "I really regret building you a time machine in the first place." He hadn't actually felt the punch hit because his entire body hurt like there were swarms of bees under his skin -- he hadn't realized that shifting phase would _hurt_ , let alone this much -- and he could tell by the way both Amaya and Thawne were now staring at the empty air where he _had_ been that he'd slipped out of phase again. _But he'd done it._ If he could do it once, he could do it again.

 

***

 

It was sort of easier the second time, except for the part where it felt like he was ripping all his atoms apart, which was probably exactly what he was doing. However, this time he managed to flicker in and out in front of all of them on the bridge of the ship.

Their expressions were ... gratifying.

 

***

 

He hadn't realized the process of watching _them_ figure out what he'd worked out over the course of months, while he could only pop in on them in incredibly painful, microseconds-long bursts of semi-corporeality, would be as frustrating as all the rest of it put together. Also, apparently sound didn't translate over, because they did not appear to be able to hear anything he tried to say.

However, once Gideon got working on the problem, and the local mechanical geniuses (Ray and Stein) finally got on the same page with what was actually happening, the construction of something which looked alarmingly like a photon cannon and was supposed to bring him back into phase happened in mere hours.

"Okay, assuming you're listening --" Ray said, adjusting the controls.

"Which obviously I am," Rip said, uselessly. Every additional attempt to force himself into phase with the regular universe had left him weaker and more wrung out, and now he could literally see through his hands. He had a feeling that additional attempts to consciously vibrate himself at a different frequency probably _would_ spread his atoms across the timestream, or just disintegrate him. 

He'd done all he could. It was up to them now.

"When we activate the beam, you need to be in front of it." Stein was speaking loudly, and making broad gestures.

"You know, Gray, if he can't hear you in the first place, I don't think that's going to help." Jefferson chimed in from where he was sitting on a cargo crate; he'd been helping with the mechanical aspects of the cannon.

They were doing it in the cargo bay because it was the closest they'd been able to find to a part of the ship where they were unlikely, or at least less likely, to destroy anything important if this went wrong. Somehow the entire bloody lot of them had drifted down to watch, including the new people who hadn't even _met_ him. (Well, okay, Amaya sort of had, but he didn't think it really counted since she'd only seen him for a fraction of a second when he punched Thawne. The idea that while she didn't know _him,_ he'd been watching her, and the rest of them, for months made him feel vaguely stalkery and he decided not to dwell on that.)

"Ready?" Ray asked, directing the question to the general air in the cargo bay.

He was as ready as he could be, and as in front of the beam as he could get. The thought occurred to him, as he stood there and waited, that he wasn't entirely sure what it was actually going to do to him. His own experiments in cross-dimensional vibration had left him feeling bruised in every cell, barely able to stand upright, and faintly transparent. If this did anything like that ... in his current state ...

It might just kill him.

He had time to hope that if it did, he'd simply evaporate, and they'd never know. Maybe they would spend the next two years trying to bring back a dimension ghost who didn't exist, but at least they wouldn't realize they'd effectively killed their friend.

Then the beam hit him, and he was right: it tore him apart.

 

***

 

"Rip!"

"Captain?"

"Hey. Hunter."

He squinted. The light was too bright, and for the love of everything, he _hurt._

And someone was holding his shoulder.

He could feel that. Pressure. Touch.

Rip jerked awake, eyes wide, gasping.

"Hey. Hey." The person holding him down was Sara, and she had a shocked, soft look on her face. "Hey, you're okay. You're okay."

He wasn't okay, at least not by any reasonable metric. He felt like every cell in his body had been forced through a cheese grater. But he raised his hands to grab her wrists, and he could feel that. He could feel ... everything, the soft whisper of the air conditioning lifting his hair, the press of the infirmary couch conforming to the shape of his back and buttocks (he'd been moved, he realized vaguely; he was in the infirmary now). The light, too bright, scraped across his eyes.

He was both hungry and thirsty, and it was the first time he'd felt either one in months.

"Miss Lance," he said, and it caught in his throat like a sob.

"Sara," she said. He was still holding her wrists in a grip that to her must be kitten-weak; he knew how easily she could break it, but her skin and bones were still pinioned in his grip, her pulse still fluttering under his fingers. "Can't you at least call me Sara?"

"Sara," he said, numbly. "Can I ... sit up?"

"Of course you can." And she moved back, caught him gracefully, helped him wait out a head rush until he managed to get himself to something like a sitting position. The infirmary couch rose with him, supporting him, by which he guessed that Gideon was involved.

"Captain Hunter," that soft, familiar voice said.

"Gideon," he breathed. He had been so busy missing the human members of the crew that he hadn't realized how much he had missed her, like a lost limb.

As he waited out the head rush (and how much did it mean to him, right now, to _feel_ that: the pulse of blood in his temples, the feeling of having a _body_ again) he became slowly aware that he and Sara weren't alone. They were all there, the whole crew, new people included: sitting on the floor, on stray stools. There were beer bottles around, and a card game spread out on the floor. He couldn't help feeling they'd been there for awhile.

"How long ..." he began, and had to cough. "How long was I out?"

"It has been seven hours, thirty-six minutes, and twelve seconds since you came back onto my telemetry in the cargo bay," Gideon said.

"Hey," Ray's voice said. Rip hadn't even noticed him moving in from the side, but he was holding out a glass of water. "You, uh ... water?"

Rip took it, in shaking fingers, and drank. He still felt bruised in every bone, but was starting to get used to it, or maybe the feeling was lessening ... he wasn't sure.

"Captain Hunter." This new voice was calm and quiet. It would have been completely unfamiliar to him a few months ago; now it only seemed strange that they had never properly met. Amaya was smiling at him, her hands tucked in the pockets of her jacket. "Thank you for helping me," she said. "It is a pleasure to meet you at last."

"I appreciate the sentiment, but ..." He looked back at Sara, who had stepped back as the others had moved in. "I'm not your captain. At least, I haven't been for months. She's your captain."

An odd blend of emotions crossed her face, hard to quantify. "We'll have plenty of time to talk about that," she said at last.

Time. He wanted to laugh hysterically at that. They had a time machine ... but he'd just had it forcibly brought home to him how much time mattered ... and how much it didn't. His head flopped back into the infirmary cradle as he tried to decide how, exactly, to process that.

"Captain Hunter has suffered trauma on a cellular level, and needs to recover." Gideon's voice was firmer than he was used to hearing from her.

"Sara Lance is your captain," Rip instructed her, turning his head to the side.

"I understand that," Gideon said. "I have served her to the best of my ability and will continue to do so. But one can serve more than one captain."

"Rip." Sara's hand on his shoulder, grounding him. He brought his hand up to cage her wrist lightly before he meant to. He just wanted to _feel._ "Do you want to be alone? We can leave --"

"No." The response was instant, helpless. "I just ... need to sleep."

He couldn't explain, perhaps had lost his always-limited ability to express things in words, but Sara only smiled and snagged a stool, pulling it up alongside his bed. She kept her hand on him the whole time. "I think there's nowhere we'd rather be."

 

***

 

It was a long time later, and he was drowsing. He'd been drifting in and out for some time, and had always found at least two or three of them there, and at least one of them touching him: Jefferson with a hand lightly resting on his ankle, or Ray leaning against him while playing poker with Heywood, or Sara with her hand curled around his arm. This time, the lights in the infirmary were lowered, and Ray was on the floor, sleeping, with a blanket over him. Mick Rory was just in the process of draping the blanket.

"Tell him to go to bed, for the timestream's sake." His voice came out rough. He was still exhausted, as if his entire body had been drained of energy. Which was probably a not-inaccurate way to describe what had actually happened, on a cellular level.

At least he no longer felt as if every muscle fiber had been personally beaten by tiny little men with whips. He just wanted to sleep for a month.

"He's like a cat. He can sleep anywhere." Mick straightened, and they looked at each other for a moment. 

"You been around this whole time?" Mick asked.

"Kind of," Rip said. His head was turned to the side, one arm spilling off the infirmary cradle's handrest.

"You ever see anyone else like you around?"

It surprised him, a little, how easily he was able to decode this. "Another -- out of phase traveler?" He'd almost said _ghost._ "No. But they would have had to be in phase with me in order for me to perceive them."

Mick nodded, a slight incline of his head.

"Do you have reason to believe there's another on the ship?"

The headshake this time was so faint he could barely perceive it, before Mick turned away.

"Mr. Rory. Wait." When Mick hesitated, Rip did, too. There was a lot between them. A lot shared; a lot ... not shared. And of course with Mick looking at him he couldn't decide what to say. At last he went for truth; he was too exhausted for anything else. "The last thing I remember before the explosion is getting you to safety. Good to see you haven't entirely done all my hard work."

Mick gave a hard, huffed almost-laugh. "If there's one thing I'm good at, _Captain,_ it's survival."

"Really? Because I've seen a lot of all of you over the last few months, and it seems that you're good at being a hero, too."

He saw Mick tense: thought, for an instant, he'd pushed too hard. Then Mick sank down on the floor beside the sleeping, blanket-covered lump of Palmer, and took a flask out of his jacket. "Shows how much you know," he muttered, and took a sip.

Rip held out the hand that had fallen off the infirmary cradle. "I haven't had a drink in _months,"_ he said piteously.

This got a genuine grin, and Mick leaned forward to press the flask into his hand.

It tasted like rubbing alcohol mixed with hobo sweat. "What is in this?" Rip wheezed when he could breathe again. "This is terrible!"

"No appreciation for the finer things," Mick grunted, leaning forward to take the flask back again.

"I do appreciate the finer things! Which this is not!" Rip coughed his way back to a normal breathing pattern -- every cell in his lungs and throat were now traumatized again.

"Your loss," Mick said, and took another slug from the flask.

Rip wordlessly held out his hand again.

Mick's laugh was entirely silent, but he passed the flask back again. The burn, as it turned out, was less brutal the second time around. Marginally.

"And just think if I'd made my escape with the rest of the timescatter," Rip choked once his throat was functional again, "I wouldn't currently be having my epithelial cells burned off. And for the record, I know you know what that means."

"I'm starting to realize having you spying on us for months could be a little bit ... inconvenient."

"Okay, again for the record, I was not spying. At least not intentionally. I tried to give you all privacy as much as possible"

"Tomato, tomahto."

"I think I liked you better," Rip muttered as he accepted the flask for another round, "when I thought you were an idiot."

He didn't mean it, though. And he knew by the quick flash of Mick's teeth, bared in a there-and-you-miss-it grin that a year ago he _would_ have missed, that Mick knew it too.


End file.
